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November 02, 2016

Why you Should Listen to your Opponent's fanbase

I'm copying most of this from a rant I posted on my other blog where I was really making a thinly-veiled political observation. But I used only baseball examples, so I thought with a few tweaks it was appropriate here:

An echo chamber is a place where ideas gain strength through
repetition. A great place to find like-minded friends who all agree with you
and reinforce your opinion. You have some slight belief in something, and
before you know it, you are 100% convinced that it is inarguably correct based
on all the feedback you hear. It can be a great place to boost your ego with so
many people who share your worldview and make of those who like the other team. But, it has its drawbacks. And they can have
grave consequences.

The first time I became aware of this phenomenon, was when I
learned of other people’s opinions of Tim McCarver. For those who don’t know who he is, McCarver
was a baseball broadcaster for many years.
Most Red Sox fans (including yours truly) weren’t fond of his
broadcasts. He would occasionally make some minor mistakes — like
misremembering player’s names for example:

— and similar things which were quite inconsequential, but Red Sox fans would go out of their way to
point out his mistakes. In social media, on message boards, on blog posts, we
would all make fun of his mistakes to point out how incompetent he was. But the
reality is he wasn’t that bad. We just didn’t like him because he was such a
diehard Yankees fan and was always openly rooting for them to win……..or so we
thought! I once drunkenly stumbled onto
a Yankees fans message board, and saw that everyone was talking about how much
they didn’t like him because he was always openly rooting for the Red Sox to
win. At first I thought this was sarcasm, but then realized that Yankees fans
truly believed he was out to get them and would always go out of his way to point
out all of Derek Jeter’s flaws. This seemed unreal to me, because charitably
you could say that non-Yankees fans always thought he went out of his way to
make Jeter look better than he was.

@Grovite With color commentary done by Tim McCarver, so he can continue to continue to verbally fellate Jeter and his intangibles.

I noticed a similar phenomenon while following baseball
games on Twitter. If an umpire made a close call go against the Red Sox, all of
my followers would complain that this guy was always biased against the Red
Sox, we never got any of the close calls, and if we lost invariably the umpire
was blamed for the loss. I then started compiling twitter lists of other team’s
fans, and made it a habit of following fans of both teams while watching any
game. It was amazing that both sets of fans would say the exact same thing
(i.e. both fanbases thought the officiating was biased against their team).

I noticed the same thing while watching games on TV. Buck
Martinez will point out that an umpire called a pitch that was 1/8 of an inch
outside the strike zone a strike against the Blue Jays, and that call could
have killed a potential rally which may have been the turning point of the
game. But he won’t say a word when that same umpire helps a Blue Jays pitcher
out of a bases loaded jam by calling a strike three on a pitch 4 inches outside
the plate. In his mind, and the thought he plants in the viewers heads, is that
Scenario 1 was an umpire biased against the Jays, scenario 2 was the Jays
pitcher hitting his spot like he was supposed to. Sigh….

On instant replay challenges, fans of one team are always
convinced that this should take no time to overturn because the call was
clearly wrong, while fans of the other team wonder why they are wasting time on
a review where the correct call was so obviously made. And regardless of the
ruling, ½ of the commenters end up frustrated at how useless the replay system
is.

I was watching the World Series and thought Joe Buck really
wanted the Chicago Cubs to win, to help the narrative of breaking the 100+
years that it’s been since they won. I saw a bunch of people on twitter echo
that same sentiment.

But most of the time, readers, viewers, observers etc.,
aren’t listening to two different sets of viewpoints. They are following their
Red Sox tweeps, or watching the Blue Jays broadcast, and just keeping
seeing/hearing one side of the narrative. And then confirmation bias kicks in.
You sort of think that maybe, something might be true, you hear a bunch of
people repeat the same thing, and now you are 100% convinced of this “fact”.

It’s hard to learn anything when we only choose to read news or follow
social media that we select specifically because it is aligned with our
existing views (or shared with us by our acquaintances who have the same
worldview). Like I said, it’s good for the ego, but it’s a good idea to
occasionally listen to a differing viewpoint, just in the off chance that you
might not be 100% correct. You may even
learn something by actively seeking out news or social media coverage of “the
other side”